by Eloisa James
“I’d like my corset,” she ordered.
Felicia’s lady’s maid, Lucy, rushed forward with her corset and laced it tightly over her chemise. Yes! That was perfect. Now Felicia’s breasts swelled enticingly and her waist looked to be the span of a man’s hand. She had never done such a risqué thing as entertain a gentleman in her dressing room. Not even her husband. Mind you, Saville had never shown the slightest interest in joining her during the dressing process.
Her maid began tucking tiny rosebuds high into a coronet on her head, from which hung precisely four ringlets. Felicia reached out and applied more color to her lips. “He may come up,” she said coolly, as if she entertained gentlemen every day of the week. “And Lucy, you may go. Return in a half hour, if you please, as I shall need to finish dressing with some dispatch.”
Lucy could be counted on to gabble to all the maids in attendance at the ball tonight, Felicia thought happily. She tweaked one curl forward over her shoulder. She did have a long nose, but really, she was remarkably well preserved. It must be her beauty that tied Mayne so closely to her side.
There was a knock and the man himself strode into her bedchamber. Felicia almost gasped. Her chamber was all frothy lace and pink ribbons; in contrast, the earl looked like the very personification of sleek masculinity. Tonight he was dressed with supreme elegance, in a coat of smoky blue that outlined the breadth of his shoulders and gave his hair the sheen of a raven’s wing. He looked utterly male and (had Felicia the wits to perceive it) rather dangerous, as if some subtle rage were driving him forward.
“Darling,” he said, bending down and dropping a kiss on her cheek so that their eyes met in the mirror. “This is an honor that I didn’t expect.”
Felicia tilted her head back, the better to show her neck. Her mother had once called it a trifle long, but Felicia disagreed. A graceful neck was a never-fading virtue. “You are always welcome by my side, even in the most intimate of circumstances,” she purred.
Somewhat to her relief, he didn’t take up the obvious suggestion, but just smiled and brought over a chair for himself. Felicia could hardly contain herself at the sight of the two of them in the mirror: he so beautiful, so potent, so devastatingly powerful. And she, leader of the ton, exquisitely dressed…Their coloring was quite perfect together.
“I need your help,” he said, bending close to her ear as if he couldn’t resist kissing it.
Felicia shook with excitement. “Anything!” she said eagerly, and then contained herself, adding languidly, “of course, darling, whatever you request.”
“I seem to have made a small mistake,” he said, “in the matter of Lady Godwin.”
Felicia blinked. “You did?”
“You are the only woman powerful enough in the ton to salvage my disastrous follies,” he continued, tracing her ear with his lips. And his hands…Perhaps Mayne did bed all those women. Perhaps he was just saving himself, building her anticipation for the moment when he would besiege her virtue. Felicia shivered a bit at the thought.
“If there’s any way I can help,” she said rather absentmindedly. It was hard not to gaze at the two of them in her mirror as if she were at the theater, watching one of those Restoration comedies from the last century. But his actual comment had finally sunk in. “I doubt I can do much to salvage Lady Godwin’s reputation, Mayne.”
“Do call me Garret,” Mayne said, trying not to breathe deeply. The woman had practically papered herself in rice powder! He was like to sneeze, if he didn’t watch himself.
“My pleasure,” she sighed.
“It appears that Lady Godwin had returned to her husband’s house merely in order to chaperone Godwin’s brother’s fiancée,” Mayne told her. “The girl is a tender little Scottish vicar’s daughter, if you can believe it, and doubtless horrified to hear that she’s been mistaken for a strumpet.”
Felicia sat straight up in her chair with the air of a fox scenting a rabbit. “You don’t mean it!”
Mayne nodded. “I’ve made an ass of myself,” he said, pulling a face of laughing mock repentance. “Blotted my copybook.”
“And what’s your excuse?” she asked, fluttering her eyelashes at him.
“Something about Lady Godwin irritates me,” he admitted. “I’m afraid that I didn’t bother to corroborate my impression that Godwin was still living with an opera singer. Now I feel, naturally enough, culpable.”
“I share your feelings about Lady Godwin,” Felicia agreed. “And now that she looks for all the world like a shorn lamb, I positively shudder to look at her. Her hair was her only beauty, you know.”
Mayne’s lips tightened, but his companion simply trilled on. “Goodness me! Are you quite, quite sure about the Scottish fiancée, Garret darling? I mean, that she’s the daughter of a vicar?”
“Alas.”
“Well, I shall do my best,” Felicia told him. “I shall inform everyone. But you know how it is!” she tittered. “Once a rumor starts, it’s impossible to stamp out. It’s not as if we know this Scottish girl, after all.”
Mayne moved behind her. One hand slipped down her throat. “You blind me,” he said softly. “Truly, you do.” He bent over and kissed her cheek. This was the tricky bit; Felicia might well take offense at his presumptuousness.
“I invited them to your ball,” he said softly.
Was that the tip of his tongue touching her throat? Felicia swallowed. “You did what?” she asked quaveringly.
“I took the enormous liberty of inviting the Scottish miss and her fiancé to your ball,” Mayne murmured against her throat. His hand had wandered down and was tracing the shape of Felicia’s breast. “They will be accompanied by the Godwins, naturally enough.”
“Her fiancé,” Felicia said, trying vainly to keep rational. “Godwin’s brother.”
“He is a vicar himself, if you can believe it,” Mayne said, tasting her skin as if she were made of the finest cream. “The brother, I mean.”
Felicia noticed that he had a white streak on his cheek from the rice powder she had shaken over her bosom. But he didn’t seem to notice the taste on his lips.
“A vicar and a vicar’s daughter,” she said dreamily, winding her arms around his neck. “A match made in heaven.”
“Just as are you and I,” he said sleekly. “Will you forgive me, then, for the impertinence of inviting guests to your ball?”
She smiled at him, a smile that combined chastisement and permission. “After tonight, Lady Godwin will be received in every house in the land,” she assured him. “And the Scottish girl as well. I think we know each other well enough, Garret, that I might allow a few…impertinences?”
“Just what I longed to hear,” he said. His smile, in the mirror, was meant both for her—and for his conscience.
Forty
Come to the Ball!
Elsewhere in London, others were preparing for the same occasion. Lady Griselda Willoughby was delicately applying a black patch to the right of her cherry-colored mouth; she had decided that her newest fashion would be to ape the ornaments of her Jacobean ancestors. She wore a gown with a small train, and the tiniest suggestion of a ruff. The Duchess of Girton was having a rather less peaceful time dressing, as her little boy kept wandering through her dressing room. He had just learned to climb down stairs backwards, and therefore he spent most of his time eluding his nursemaids and unerringly finding his way to his mama’s chambers. Lady Esme Bonnington was even further behind in the process, as her husband Sebastian had appeared in her room with an urgent request, and what with one thing and other (some of which involved unbuttoning rather than buttoning), she hadn’t even put on a stitch of clothing yet.
But the most assiduous preparations were taking place at Number Fifteen, Rothsfeld Square. Monsieur Olivier had been to the house and left again: Lina’s glossy brown curls were now a shadow of their former self, thinned, curled and starched into rigid little ringlets that dangled about her ears.
“I’m so sorry!” Helene sa
id again, staring at the glass. “He went too far! What will Tom say?”
But Lina couldn’t stop smiling. She didn’t give a fig for the demise of her hair. “It will grow back,” she said.
“Do you think I ought to add more freckles, or am I overdoing the effect, Madam?” Saunders asked, stepping back.
Helene looked at the mirror and gave a faint shudder. Lina had sprouted a multitude of freckles. First Saunders painted them over the bridge of her nose, which was all very well. But then she went farther afield and now there were battalions of brown speckles marching along Lina’s forehead, making her look far older than her years.
“I’m sorry!” Helene said again.
“Don’t be,” Lina replied. Their eyes met in the mirror and Lina knew that she didn’t have to say the rest of it out loud. She would never stop being grateful for the gift of Tom.
Saunders was mixing a little red sandlewood with chalk. As she painted it onto Lina’s lips they took on a slightly palsied air, as if the color had leached out of them.
“Well, that should do it,” Lina said cheerfully. “No self-respecting opera singer would look like this.”
“No, indeed,” Helene said with some satisfaction. “You look—you look—”
“A proper fright,” Lina finished.
“Not so terrible. Countrified, perhaps?”
“I am a country vicar’s wife,” Lina said, and there was a note of joy in her voice.
“Now for the gown,” Saunders said. She returned from the wardrobe with a gown reverentially laid over her arms.
Two minutes later, Lina was swathed—positively swathed—in white lace.
“Perhaps it’s overpoweringly innocent,” Helene said dubiously. She had picked out the pattern and fabric herself, ordering it from a modiste, Madame Pantile, whom she’d long heard was liable to make ill-fitting and over-trimmed clothing. And Madame Pantile had certainly lived up to her reputation. Every inch of Lina’s gown was trimmed with blonde lace, or point lace, or bunches of white ribbon.
“Are you certain that the wreath isn’t too much?” Lina said, showing the first signs of uneasiness.
“Oh no!” Helene said. “I consider the wreath a stroke of genius! Who but Madame Pantile could have designed a wreath made of silver oak leaves ornamented with heron’s feathers? At least…that’s what she told me they were. Who would have thought that heron’s feathers were quite so tall?”
“My head will topple to the side if I’m not very careful,” Lina said, demonstrating her predicament.
“Excellent. You need to look awkward while dancing.”
“That won’t be a problem,” Lina commented. “Wearing shoes that are too large makes it extremely difficult to be graceful.”
Helene beamed. “That was a clever notion of Esme’s, was it not?”
The night was going as well as Felicia could possibly have hoped. Mayne was at her side just enough so that her friends and her enemies couldn’t help but notice his devotion, and yet he wasn’t there so much that she felt constrained in recounting every detail of his physique and technique to her friends. Her husband was off in the card room, apparently acting in an appropriate manner. The ballroom was an utter crush. In all, the only thing missing to make her ball discussed throughout those boring fall months was a Sensation.
Something had to happen. An elopement, a betrayal, an argument. Something! She glanced around the room. What a pity it was that Esme Rawlings had married Lord Bonnington. Infamous Esme could always be relied upon to create some sort of a sensation, but now she had dwindled into positive respectability. There she was, dancing with her husband and it must be for the third time, at least. That was a scandal, to Felicia’s mind, a scandal of hideously boring proportions.
At that moment there was a bit of a flurry at the door, and Felicia turned with relief. Perhaps the Regent had decided to—no.
Who on earth could it be?
A grotesquely bedizened girl, with plumes so high they were likely to be set alight by the candelabra hanging from the ceiling, had appeared at the top of the short flight of stairs leading to the ballroom. Felicia didn’t recognize her escort but there, behind her, was Earl Godwin so that must be—
There was a titter in her ear. “Famous, my dear! Your ball is going to be notorious!” The Honorable Gerard Bunge suddenly appeared, for all the world like a jack-in-the-box in amethyst stockings, if such a thing existed. “That must be the vicar’s daughter, or rather, the strumpet as Mayne had it!” He reeled slightly from the force of his own giggles. “Could be Mayne’s going blind if he mistook that one for a Bird of Paradise!”
“She’s rather an eyesore, is she not?” Felicia said with amusement. “Come along, Bunge. I must greet her, you know.”
At the tap of a hostess’s fan on their shoulder, her guests fell away before her, leaving Felicia a full view of the uncultivated lass whom Mayne, her darling Mayne, had insulted. And what a mistake that was! Felicia had rarely seen such an ungainly, rustic girl as the one clumsily curtsying before Lady Bonnington.
“You’d better make haste,” Bunge said in her ear, as they expertly made their way through the crowded room. “She just poked the Duke of Girton in the eye with those plumes. How could Mayne ever have thought this one was a fashionable impure? They wouldn’t have let her in the door of the opera house!”
Felicia held out her hand languidly. The country miss bobbed an inept curtsy and gabbled something. Felicia backed away as quickly as she could, to avoid being struck in the face by her waving plumes.
“I must say, this is quite a surprise, to see you in the presence of Lord Godwin,” she said aside to the countess. “I thought you two were quite, quite adverse to being in each other’s company.”
“Oh, we are,” Helene Godwin said cheerfully. “But I couldn’t allow Mrs. Holland to come to town without a chaperone.”
“Mrs. Holland!” Felicia exclaimed.
Lady Godwin clapped a hand over her mouth. “Oh no, I let the truth out! Well, the fact is that Mr. Holland, my brother-in-law, married his fiancée this morning. But we didn’t want to announce the news until the happy couple has informed her father, in Scotland. He is a vicar, you know, and I believe he hoped to marry them himself. So you must promise not to tell anyone, Lady Saville!”
Felicia nodded, already planning the three or four acquaintances who would be lucky enough to hear the news first.
Lady Godwin drew a little closer. “The dear girl was so devastated to hear of the rumors flying around London—you do know what I mean, don’t you?”
“A crime!” Felicia whispered back, ignoring the fact that she herself had been instrumental in spreading most of those criminal rumors.
“Yes, I do agree,” Lady Godwin said. “You know, Lady Saville, you or I may chat about a matter of interest that occurs in the ton, but we would never make something up out of whole cloth! And I’m afraid that is just what the Earl of Mayne must have done. Why, everyone in London knows that my husband dismissed his mistress months ago.”
Felicia nodded vigorously. “I had heard the same myself, from a number of people,” she assured the countess. “Mayne has much to answer for!”
“Dear Mrs. Holland is happy now,” Lady Godwin said. “All’s well that ends well, after all. And who could possibly think her a woman of ill repute after seeing her endearing little face?”
“Who indeed?” Felicia murmured, suppressing a shudder as she watched the new Mrs. Holland stumble her way through a country dance.
“Marriage solves so many problems,” Lady Godwin commented. “Now she and my dear brother-in-law can go back to the country, and she can simply forget this unpleasant little episode.”
“And you, my dear?” Felicia said, returning to a more interesting topic. “Do you think to remain in your husband’s house, or will you return to your mother?”
“Well…just for your ears only, Lady Saville—”
“Do call me Felicia!”
“Felicia,” the co
untess repeated. “What a lovely name. The truth is, I haven’t quite made up my mind! For some things, you know, husbands are a necessary evil.”
Felicia nodded, although to be sure, she couldn’t think of a single one of them.
Forty-one
The Seduction
Floating through the house, up the stairs, came fragments of melody. He was playing the same piece over and over, the madrigal from Act Two, she thought.
Finally Helene got up and put on her serviceable dressing gown, tying it tightly around her waist. It was a good thing there were so few servants, given the number of nights she had spent tiptoeing around the house inadequately dressed.
The candelabra on the piano were burning quite low. They cast a pool of light that made the polished surface of the piano look clover-yellow, and tipped Rees’s eyelashes and curls with fire. She walked forward. Her robe made a gentle hushing noise as it dragged through the sheaves of paper that had again accumulated around the piano.
His head jerked up immediately. Without speaking, without taking his eyes from hers, he rose from the piano.
Helene was experiencing, for almost the first time in her life, the heady intoxication of being a siren, a séductrice. She pushed the ugly, white dressing gown from her shoulders as if it were made of flowing silk, let it catch on her elbows so the fabric framed her body. She’d left her night rail on her bed.
Rees took one step toward her and then Helene started to walk toward him. It was as if the candlelight drew her into its circle; as she came closer to him, her body turned to flame itself, heat racing up the back of her legs.
He seemed mesmerized. She slowly walked forward until she stood in the circle of light that made the rest of the room fade away into obscurity, as if there were only the two of them in the world.
Still without saying a word, he wrenched off his shirt. The swirl of air made the candles bend and dance. Golden tongues of fire swept over her body, over his chest. She couldn’t remember why she thought chest hair was so revolting, years ago. Compared to Mr. Fairfax-Lacy’s hairless chest, Rees looked ruggedly masculine, with a kind of burly strength that made her feel weak in the knees. His heavily muscled chest rippled when he moved, making her breasts tingle to be crushed against him.